At 10.26 3/7/2006 +0100, Geoffrey Sampson wrote:
I have always understood, and it sounds plausible, that
the reason why we write "John's" as the genitive of "John" is because in
centuries past, when less was known than today about language history,
people mistakenly believed that the genitive form "John's" had arisen as
a reduction of "John his" (and it was sometimes written out like that in
full). -- No, I don't know how they explained "Mary's" either.
We know that the possessive apostrophe is a relatively recent development and was not used by Shakespeare, for example. If the possessive apostrophe started out in the mistaken etymologising belief that there was some form of elision, perhaps there might be a case for getting rid of it (the way it is happening in a lot of informal written text - eg St Johns Wood - and maybe even formal text - eg Harrods, Woolworths), and we might be able to stop telling people not to use the apostrophe in the possessive pronoun its!
Cheers,
Peter
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